CALL ME ISHMAELLE

A woman joins a whaling crew in this revisionist take on Moby-Dick.

Chinese British novelist-memoirist Guo tells this story from the perspective of Ishmaelle, a young woman born in coastal England. An orphan whose infant sister has died and whose elder brother has left to work as a sailor, she makes a journey west to Nantucket, then, posing as a man, joins the crew of a whaling ship, the Nimrod. She’s careful about becoming too close to her shipmates, lest her identity be discovered—and the captain, Seneca, is fearsomely crazed in his obsession with a white whale. But she prides herself on her ability to keep up with her shipmates, befriending a Queequeg-like harpooner, Kauri, who stokes the narrative’s intensifying focus on difference and identity. (“I was half-woman half-man. We were both strays, far away from each of our queer countries.”) Guo’s plot rhymes with that of the source novel, with some notable differences. Seneca and second mate Freedman are both Black in a novel set in the 1860s, highlighting themes of entrapment and freedom, and Guo adds a character that Seneca consults with—a Taoist expert in the I Ching named Muzi—to speak on matters of fate and the range of religious traditions aboard. And, of course, Ishmaelle’s womanhood also sets the story off-kilter, sometimes painfully for her. Guo dispenses with the digressions on whaling that thickened Melville’s novel, making this one more propulsive and immediate. But she blends in her own rhetorical tweaks, shifting to the mad, complex voices of Seneca and, at times, the whales themselves. The depth is worthy of the source, while highlighting a simple point: “Men are strange, and dangerous.”

A rich addition to Melvilliana.